


star-hunger

by JadeClover



Series: star-hewn colossi [7]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 13:06:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15582639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeClover/pseuds/JadeClover
Summary: "She is his high priestess. He is her emperor. They are more than that, beings skewed on a dozen different angles."-Five moments evidencing the nature of a partnership.





	star-hunger

**Author's Note:**

> First of two pieces for [@galrashipzine](https://galrashipzine.tumblr.com/)'s Zaggar Zine :D
> 
> I had a lot of fun with this one, and it turned out to be one of my favorite fics I've ever written.

"Lord."  
  
She is wild and untamed when she comes to him—again, for once she was something that could fit itself into a mortal shell, once she was different, once she had only ambitions and then she broke the universe with them.  
  
He turns, the stars slipping into his peripheral, his mantle's heavy folds hiding claws that clench into gauntlets with the urge to act, but he cannot, for an emperor must have patience, must choose when and when not to rip the universe to shreds—  
  
There she stands, head ducked low. As though threads tie them on a level deeper than flesh and bone, the sensation flows through his own veins—the power racing in her limbs with no release, how when she angles her head, her hair falling loose, an energy spikes through her. That he cannot see its evidence—violet arcs of her magic crackling down her arms, placing itself in her hands to be used—is an act of restraint he can scarcely comprehend. She is a master of control... but keeping force locked away in a cage is dangerous...  
  
_What do you do to yourself?_  
  
A closer glance—her breath comes short and shallow, her jaw set, her brows drawn. What caused this? Her beast? The battle outside? Did she go too long without even considering tucking herself in a bed to rest?  
  
Or do the stars merely rage in her with that hunger he will never understand?  
  
"Haggar."  
  
She bows her head. "Sire."  
  
_Yes?_  
  
_What do you need?_  
  
( _Once, she had yet to learn the fine art of controlling her own power. She let it build to ultimatums within the shell of her body—_ burn this or let it burn you. _Centuries passed since she was last a danger—to herself or her surroundings—but once, when magic threaded through her veins and her eyes glowed too-bright, when she sought the stars like no part of her was a mortal being, she allowed him to draw close, to press a hand over her chest and feel the frenetic beat of her heart. That wild rhythm he remembers now, not so much a pulse as an echoing vibration running ceaseless beneath his thoughts._ )  
  
"My lord," she murmurs when the silence stretches too long, when her words fail her, and she dips her head lower, lower, her fists unclenching and curling tight again, _lower_ until she must sink to her knees in a bow. With one hand pressed to the floor to keep her balance, her hair falls around her, robes blooming out where she kneels like a jagged-edged star, gold and violet and black. She kneels not as a servant to a master, nor as a subject to her emperor—only as a force of nature before the eye of its storm, because this is their way. _Her_ way.  
  
He knows what she will ask.  
  
"Sire," she says, "my creation will arrive in twenty-five doboshes. Let me keep the enemy at bay until it can fight."  
  
Once it was he who ran himself too thin with an effort to do, and she taught him to know his limits, to accept them—( _tried to teach him, and picked up the pieces when he would not learn_ ).  
  
But here... her limits broke long ago.  
  
The beast requires time to transport—that is no failure in its design. Neither of them expected the Iokk to take the offensive so suddenly... or perhaps _she_ did, perhaps she thought them capable of it. Perhaps that is why her eyes burn so terribly, because this time the Empire's enemy was _her_ enemy first. Her latest project became personal. And she _did not_ rest enough, he knows, but suggesting she do so now is folly when enemy vessels swarm the space around his command ship and every part of her itches to _act._  
  
"Do you have a means of taking down their fighters?" But that is only a formality, following the paths they long ago wore into existence.  
  
"Yes, lord." She will do it herself. She has no weapons to use—only her own power, but magnified or focused in a way of her choosing. He would judge her a match for any fighter vessel regardless.  
  
And she asks his permission for this when he could no more stop her than swat the Iokkain ships like insects. ( _He_ could _—but at what cost?_ )  
  
Decaphoebs fall away, and decaphoebs stack themselves on. He knew her as long as she can remember; he would swear he knew her longer, though how could he, when _she_ was only _she_ after waking from an unnatural death? She is his high priestess. He is her emperor. They are more than that, beings skewed on a dozen different angles. She fights for him—innovates for him, creates for him, invents and takes apart and reconstructs the universe for him.  
  
And she answers to him... when it suits her. She chases the stars on her own when it does not, but each time, unfailingly, she returns. No force in the universe can command her to follow him, but when left to her own whims, he knows he will find her near, where she lets her power become his, lets his strength become hers just the same.  
  
The light in her eyes gleams bright and dangerous. The true marvel is not that such power builds in her but that there is _still no sign of it,_ no hint of violet bending the air around her. What a feat this is. This is why the wise fear his high priestess.  
  
( _Once, he jested and asked her if she was an attack beast like the ones she builds for him, put at his command. She grinned and wove some half-playing affirmative in kind, and he remembers not the words she spoke then but the look in her eyes—bright, sharp, and endless._ )  
  
In her hands, loyalty is a greater weapon than any, and he earned her devotion long ago—an unbreakable thread connecting them, one piece of their bond.  
  
"Do it."  
  
She rises in a swift movement, bows her head—a nod. "Yes, my lord."  
  
And then she is gone, black smoke swirling and spitting a maelstrom of violet lightning where his high priestess once stood. He strides to the viewport at the audience chamber's edge, footsteps echoing in a realm of tempered, illusory quiet, the pale shapes of enemy ships streaking between battlecruisers as soundless and distant as imagined starscapes.  
  
He watches the silent battle rage.  
  
_You could break yourself on this, Haggar,_ he thinks.  
  
( _So easily, without intention._ )  
  
_Do not. Come back to me._  
  
But she will. Sure as time and space and all reality's many laws, she craves the power of the stars but knows when to let her hunger lie. She returns to his side because with the whole of the universe spread before her, she searched it and found the one place she wishes to remain.  
  
And in this, he trusts.  
  
This is what devotion wrought.  
  


* * *

  
  
Legends spread in the lower decks, in the soldiers' rumors, in the officers' ears while they pretend not to hear ( _but repeat them later, sharp and bitter_ ). They speak of the Emperor's witch—that she pulls strings behind the throne, that she vanishes those who speak against her, that her magic takes living souls and eats them, that she knows not how to love. Haggar claims truth in each of these, but he leaves the matter of definitions to her. He knows her only as she is, too real to be contained in words, too dear for him to try. She perches in her lab, bent over workstations and diagrams and half-finished, quintessence-fueled devices, and she stands between him and all who mean him harm, destroys his enemies as her own. She says, "Yes, lord," and "Of course," and quiet, pensive, "The universe is yours, sire," to which he corrects, _"Ours,"_ and watches something in her gaze soften. She is the figure stood at his side, resolute, watchful, ever-present, and the one curled against him at night, still and quiet and soft, the side of herself she trusts no other to see.  
  
How could words contain this?  
  
A memory comes to the fore, blurred at the edges with how it resembles others of its kind, yet bright and clear regardless. In the ghosts of remembered sensations, adrenaline courses through his veins, almost as potent as the quintessence her druids infused him with not vargas before.  
  
In burning away excess energy, he went too far—a habit of his. Time gives him the grace to accept it, if not to change, but that night cost him nothing but spare scraps of skin.  
  
He sits and she stands before him, her brows knit together, her jaw set, for it was _her_ creation that did this to him. She cares not that attacking him was its _purpose,_ a beast built for his private training rings. Calculations and adjustments turn like gleaming cogs behind her eyes, and he tracks the progress of thoughts spun over and around until she can think them through without thinking: What could have made her creation just as fearsome a challenge while also the necessary fraction of a degree less likely to harm him?  
  
Nothing could have changed it, an accident born from colliding unlikelihoods too random to prevent, too inconsequential to try, but her narrowed eyes track the drip of violet-limned blood down the side of his face, her features still writ in a fearsome scowl but beneath that, where only he can read, openly unhappy.  
  
The dark-corridor rumors stir in the back of his thoughts, the improbable notion that his high priestess knows not how to love. _Impossible._  
  
Her hands rest on his skin, her fingertips points of warmth at his temples and cheekbones, and she tilts his head closer, angling it as he allows while she examines him. He offers her a blink, an easy, too-free thing, adrenaline's remnants leaving him loose and sated as the burn of ill-judged scrapes mingles with the heat of quintessence in his veins.  
  
Her lips thin, shoulders loosening, and she lets out a long sigh. Her gaze turns softer when she returns it to the dripping gash on his cheek, still stinging from the beast's claws. "I suppose nothing will convince you to take more care?"  
  
At her low voice, worn by care of her own she claims not to exist—only then does an inkling of regret surface. "More care was not possible." Not entirely a lie—the quintessence gave him too much energy to burn, a sensation he always forgets she would know too well.  
  
_"Hm."_ Disbelief. He will not argue.  
  
Her fingertips warm until blazing points of heat press against his face, energy concentrating almost bright enough to glow—a light in her eyes, at least, if not in the material world. Power weaves through cells from her skin to his, and lightly, scarcely touching but drawing a line through blood all the same, she ghosts the tip of one finger down the wound's edge. The heat floods him, from skull to shoulders to spine, pain dissipating into warmth.  
  
The last, lingering threads of adrenaline finally fade, and he studies the quiet, narrow-eyed concentration on her face. Rumors say the Witch is terrifying, that she would kill him to take his throne if she thought she could hold it, that she is anything in the universe but the being stood before him. He knows better. She claims herself cold, a scientist before all else, not made for showing care, and it may be true... but she is so very good at healing him.  
  
She puts him back together.  
  
When her spells finish, every scrape she could find repaired—even the ones a single varga of quintessence-enhanced healing would easily erase—silence falls. She steps nearer. A tick passes, a single moment left hanging in the air, before hesitation falls away and she bends her head to his, pressing forehead to forehead and tracing with cooling fingertips the softness of newly-repaired skin.  
  
His eyes fall closed. His breathing slows, that wild energy now nothing but a memory, and the universe finally stills in the way it does when peace settles in.  
  
They do not speak. He rests a hand on her waist, she stays near, and in this quiet moment, he knows her as she truly is.  
  


* * *

  
  
He trails into the viewing deck long after she arrives, slipping through empty corridors like a specter in abandoned halls. His command ship never sleeps, but it lists and changes in cycles of virtual night and day, entire decks still and silent at a time, tired-eyed soldiers constantly replaced by fresh ones. The pocket where the bridge dwells ticks slowly through its night cycle, steady calm reaching quiet fingers down corridors and elevator shafts to encompass this small deck on its outskirts, tucked so far in the corners where no one thinks to venture that it would see no more activity in the height of day. He might wonder that Haggar knows of its existence, but she designed his command ship like a maze, like a temple, and she keeps its secrets collected in her mind—even the mundane ones, the plain, forgotten viewing decks, the ones not even an emperor would have cause to know about, but he does.  
  
Deserted corners in the dead of night—they haunt their ship like ghosts, do they not?  
  
While she waited, the stars won her attention. Her head turns not a fraction of a degree at the approach of quiet, armored footsteps, but he knows better than to think he imagines the weight of her awareness settling over him.  
  
He trails down the handful of steps to the sunken viewing area, the blaze of constellations drawing his gaze as well, his eyes narrowing against the artificially-tempered brightness where the suns creeps into sight at the viewport's edge. As though natural, as though the two of them are anything but silent specters with little need for night and day, he settles beside her.  
  
Silence stretches. The stars burn.  
  
"Sire," she says.  
  
( _Sire, or lord—her names for him, despite that she is the only being in the universe who need not bow to etiquette... yet she has her habits, and without them, she would be a stranger._ )  
  
Idly, she lifts a hand, and a crackle of violet flares in his peripheral—a flexing of the hand and the quintessence veins within. Maintenance. She ensures her hands stay fit to the task of channeling her magic. A small movement, but important—deceptively so. Much of her is deceptive. She hides brute strength behind a mask of subtleties and thrives all the more for it.  
  
The silence hangs heavy in the air, like an answer with no words, only familiarity. _Go on._  
  
She shifts, legs halfway to crossed with her soles pressed together. Curled over them, she tilts her face toward Kas Elyx. The constellation gleams beyond the viewport, and the dawning suns cast the lower half of her face in gold. "Our empire grows," she murmurs.  
  
A low rumble echoes from his chest. "Indeed."  
  
"Where will it end?"  
  
The stars turn her pensive tonight. He casts his gaze to Kas Elyx—( _the Knight, the Loyal, the Guardian—he named those stars for her_ )—and he thinks, but this is a question for the realist, not the dreamer.  
  
( _He does not dream—not now. Night-times are for plotting, for charting courses, for seeing them made real._ )  
  
"Where do the stars end?" he asks.  
  
In his peripheral, he catches only the barest turn of her head. "The universe expands exponentially from all points. The stars end only where existence itself does."  
  
"There, the Empire ends. The borders will expand no further."  
  
In her voice comes a curl of something warm like humor but sparking like flame: "You are a dreamer, sire."  
  
"A realist."  
  
"Indeed. And what will stop you from taking all of reality itself under your rule?"  
  
A low, brief rumble, too expressive, too unbidden. "Is that rhetoric or curiosity?"  
  
"Either. Both." The pause hangs in open air. "Whichever you wish it to be."  
  
Silence lingers for a tick more.  
  
"Nothing," he says. "No force in the universe will prevent the Galra Empire's expansion."  
  
A small _hm_ from her, and she resettles, drawing one leg and curling over it.  
  
"What other purpose awaits us but to conquer all?" he murmurs. "All the universe's strength, its glory..."  
  
"It will be ours," she finishes. "We are made to take the stars in our hands."  
  
A low, faint, satisfied rumble fills the air between them, all the answer he needs to give, and it too returns to silence, a lasting one. Kas Elyx and the suns gleam before them.  
  
When at last the quiet grows too empty, his thoughts unsettled and aching for more, he stands. Measured footsteps bring him to the viewport, where he lays a clawed hand against the glass. The universe spreads out in all direction, calls him. Not once did it ever stop calling.  
  
Only one force ever called louder.  
  
She stands at his side, her approaching footfalls quieted to nothing, and rests her own small hand against the pane—smaller, but no less powerful. Her voice low and burning, she says, "The universe will be ours, sire. I swear it."  
  
She will. She means to ensure all existence bows at his feet, and she can make it so—doubt cannot infect this belief, his faith in her faith, not when he knows the drive that builds her into an unstoppable force of nature, when he feels it in kind as a part of her calls on him to answer. They push each other to new heights, his mate-of-the-heart and he.  
  
Galaxies wait before them. Constellations gleam.  
  
In a universe of darkness, together they hold the stars.  
  


* * *

 

  
She cranes her neck and casts a long glance over the holopad in his hand, the slight weight of her head returning to his arm a tick later. A night-time quiet hangs around them, silent as the void of space but for the sounds-below-sound of a ship's system humming, ticking, mechanics and magical constructs alive around them. She would hear them, _know them,_ better than he, but in a stillness so complete, they hover at the edges of his senses just the same, almost a physical presence.  
  
Lifting his hand slowly so as not to disturb the arm she leans on, he trails a clawtip down the pad's screen, text pulled along to the report's next heading. An analysis of the Empire's acquisitions and losses in the past five decaphoebs—an unenthralling sequence of lists and percentages, but the manner of administrative necessity no empire may thrive without.  
  
Haggar's ears shift, tracking sounds too low for him to hear, the one pressed against his arm tilting just enough to feel through sleeve and hood. After a tick, they settle. "We require additional refineries to match the quintessence influx," she murmurs. "Site selection is already underway."  
  
No mere report can contain the Empire's recent gains, achievements he foolishly thought impossible with their current rate of expansion. He reaches for more, and as ever, unfailingly, the universe gives up its bounties. Were he inclined toward leisure, contentment, he might take his well-earned gains and rest—call it _enough,_ if only for a time—but he is far too disciplined, too steadfast to succumb to complacency's easy lure. What had he learned? ( _What had she taught him long ago?_ ) That they cannot stop, they must always move forward.  
  
Yet— _ironic,_ he rests at this very moment. Despite deliberate illusions of godhood, even emperors must. He sheds armor and mantle, if only for a few precious vargas, trades action for thought, decisiveness for a quiet, unhurried contemplation. The night cycle enforces a rest of the mind, even when the body will go another dozen quintants without.  
  
He retreats to his quarters and gives himself over to idleness, to relaxation. When it suits her, Haggar curls with him—and this is natural.  
  
His feet tangle, left bare against the heated floor, claws scraping skin but too light to score. At his side, Haggar's own miniature feet hide under the trailing ends of her robes, her legs pulled flush to her chest and the rest of her a boneless, curling sprawl against him. She tilts her head, a shift almost too slight to feel, and presses her face into his arm.  
  
His ears flick back, a movement unseen, unnoticed, lost to time and space and inconsequentiality. He passes the datapad to his other hand and works the nearer one free, a tick later resting it feather-light atop her head, while she merely shifts closer, angling herself more comfortably now his arm no longer blocks her way.  
  
( _This, too, is natural._ )  
  
Her form against his side is a warm, slight weight, more robes than anything, but a pressure and a presence— _real._ He lets his hand fall to her waist, and she allows it. She is a mercurial, boundless creature, always chasing the stars, but when she finally rests, the hunger that eats worlds gives way to a stillness that settles the heart.  
  
He pauses, casts one last glance over her, out to the spread of galaxies beyond the viewport, and his eyes narrow in contentment. The universe is theirs, theirs alone, nothing in it but for what they share.  
  
He knows her well—knows thoughts still turn behind the veil of a peaceful guise, her mind incapable of true stillness until the weight of sleep finally drags her under—and it will not, not tonight. In that way, one of many, he is like her, and together they are like the Empire—ceaseless, sleepless, never-ending.  
  
His gaze falls back to the datapad, aligning again to rows of words and numbers.  
  
A night of comfort, of quiet, of company—but like the Empire, they do not stop, and as ever, there is work to be done.  
  


* * *

  
  
She comes late from the labs, but _late_ scarcely exists between them when they know neither schedules nor appointments—not for this. Routine never took hold for what happens so rarely, that single night out of twenty-odd in which they must finally close their eyes never lining up the same. Their variable patterns of sleep so often miss one another entirely, but the rare quintant needs align, they _indulge,_ take their rest together, lay down their tools and themselves and curl together like young lovers wanting nothing but the rhythm of a familiar heartbeat. Never mind that neither in mind nor in body are they young, or that the Galran heart beats a different rhythm than the Altean one; millennia will never steal this habit from them. They are mates of the heart, and just as they crave the universe, they crave one another, but quietly, softly, powerfully, endlessly.  
  
Yet she is late, and the night ticks on.  
  
When she arrives, she bypasses the door entirely, a twist of black smoke revealing his scowling high priestess, her eyes narrowed and shoulders raised roughly to the height of her ears. Her eyes light on him, and that sharp edge softens, if only for a tick, but secure in itself, the fire returns. In low tones, not irreverent but largely unconcerned, with _"sire"_ listing more toward a casual appellation than a title ( _and all the better for it_ ), she furnishes him with a report of her lab's recent failings.  
  
The report would only be a true one if he sat in his throne, the familiar starscapes of his audience chamber around them, but she recites it just the same—a cadence of facts, incidents, results... Without a break in the sharp-edged flow of words, she tosses back her hood and strips herself free of heavy robes, climbing into his bed and wrapping herself in the covers. The description of unsuccesses halts once blankets drape over her like a replacement cloak, and now the weariness finds its way to the surface, a slow, crawling sense of exhaustion pulling its way from cracks she never wore before. She pushes herself to her limits... but is he not the same?  
  
He settles beside her on the mattress, his quintessence-hungry limbs grateful to finally settle ( _as they always ache the night before she gives him the infusion_ ). She only moves once she can curl against him, her feet braced against his thigh and the rest of her laid close. Like a slow trickle, he can watch the tension fade from her shoulders.  
  
"The _Bellifer_ will divert and seek out the resources you require," he murmurs. An offer.  
  
"That... would be useful." Her tone—appreciative, behind the deceptive mildness.  
  
Then she falls quiet, too quiet, a silence so familiar and complete he knows she grows too tired to speak. This is what she does, always: She works herself to exhaustion—for him—and when she pushes too far, she trusts him to guard her sleep.  
  
( _This is what devotion wrought._ )  
  
How familiar this is. How... comforting.  
  
Decaphoebs fall away and return tenfold in the drifting swirl of thoughts before sleep. He knew her as long as she can remember, knew her _longer,_ and the past and the present and the future all dwell with him tonight. He shed pieces of an old life by necessity, because it exists no longer, because she is no longer the one who was a part of it. He will not let himself think the name, envision her face, though it still comes to mind at the hint of a call, because _she..._ is _gone._ She is gone, she is here beside him, she is the small, quiet creature he still loves to hold in his arms.  
  
( _This is what they are, this is what they became._ )  
  
He bends his head, presses his face to the crown of her hair in what is almost a kiss. _My star,_ he thinks, that old word, too, locked away—but only into the corners of his own thoughts.  
  
_My star, know this: I would tear down the universe for you._


End file.
